Shiny Black Buttons Like teamphotoshop homepage

Can anybody point me to tutorials how to create the shiny black buttons as found on the teamphotoshop.com homepage? Specifically, with the highlighting at the top & bottom. I'm having trouble creating realistic dark gray / black buttons. Thanks in advance.

David

There are several ways to do it.... the easiest is to just apply an "inner bevel" layer style...

Make your button shape on a layer by itself

double click the layer in the layers pallet

In the layer styles dialog select "bevel and emboss"

If you move the styles dialog over to the side so you can see the button, you can play with the settings and see the button change in real time.

Thanks for the info & quick response...

I have already been playing around with the bevel & emboss and that does give me standard 3d button. However, that doesn't give me exactly the results that I am looking for (okay...I'm a bit anal about this).

It looks like to me that the buttons may use the bevel & emboss, but also use some type of gradient in order to get the highlight on top and also the reflective highlight on bottom. I don't know though...I'm just a recent Paint Shop Pro turned Photoshop convert

ahhh, ok... well in that case we can go a little further. I imagine Pank did a little "airbrushing" for the highlights. In fact he may have done the bevels on those buttons with the airbrush alone.

Make your shape

CTR+click on the layer in the layers pallet

That will give you a marching ant selection around the button shape.

with that selection you can airbrush the edges on the button while the actual brush tip is "OUTSIDE" the selection... use a soft brush and just lightly kiss the edge of the selection.

Thats another way to do the bottom gradient you see on those buttons.

The highlight on the top, I would probably just make a duplicate of my button shape layer. CTR+click on it.... and then fill it with a light color....
Move the duplicate layer "Under" the original in the layers pallet.
Then move it "UP" about a pixel.

Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.

It works pretty good. I also tried playing around with the gradient a bit and that seems to do the trick too, although not as good.